A national IT organisation has urged the government not to be too heavy-handed with public sector IT cuts - which are likely to affect job prospects for IT contractors.

The National Computing Centre's head of marketing Michael Dean says that the government must learn from previous experiences and understand why projects have not gone to plan rather than rashly cutting funding.

He notes that billions of pounds has been spent on trying to implement a real-time electronic patient system within the NHS and yet it is still not operational.

Yet this should prompt the government to look at how such projects are managed in the future, rather than causing them to scrap them.

According to research from GS1 UK, 78 per cent of hospital nurses and doctors identified real-time electronic patient records as a measure that would improve the NHS.

Meanwhile, a recent report from Ovum has indicated that 35 government IT sourcing contracts will be up for renegotiating in the next two years.